The New Humanist has a fascinating article on two Chinese mythbusters everyone should know - Caijing Magazine's science editor Fang Xuanchang and biochemist-turned-fraud-exposer Fang Shimin. Both are in a fight against psuedoscience and fake resumes, and both have suffered for it. more ›

Oh hurrah, with just about 200-some days left to go, the main pavilion for the Shanghai Expo - that red one that looks kind of like a square temple - was finished yesterday, making it the first out of the four central pavilions to be ready for interior design work, according to Shanghai Daily. The pavilion highlights Shanghai's various eco-friendly initatives (solar energy, plant walls, and the like) spans a whopping area of 11.5 hectares - the size of 21 American football fields - and will house exhibitions highlighting the link between humans, cities, and the Earth. We can't wait to wander around inside it! more ›

If you've been following the recent chatter on China's green market potential, but don't quite see how it's possible, then come to GIGA's talk on green building labeling and practices in China this Thursday. Jihong Han, Department Manager of Building Innovation Technology of Shanghai Research Insitute of Building Sciences (SRIBS) and the Administrative Vice Director of Green Building R&D Centre of Ministry of Construction (MOC), will discuss China's evaluation standards for green buildings and their built results, as well as present case studies to highlight China's green building progress that you can tell your skeptical friends about. Check out our calendar for more information [Cleaner Greener China] more ›

• Black is White, White is Black [Asia Sentinel] "“Even now I still cannot calm down. Only rage, rage and rage. Only extreme (expletive) rage! I can never imagine how a government, a great nation, which has more or less squeezed itself in on the international stage, and which has earned a bit of status in the international community, can be so shameless, knavish, lawless, unable to tell right from wrong, black from white, turning a victim into an accused, twisting facts and twisting truths - how can such a nation and motherland be so thick-skinned as to tell Hong Kong people to be patriotic?"
• China unveils high-speed railways [BBC] "China has announced plans to build 42 new high-speed railway lines over the next three years. In a breakthrough, China has developed trains that can run on both high-speed and normal lines, said railway official Zhang Shuguang. A 500km/h train will be tested by the end of next year, Mr Zhang said. China will have added 13,000km of high-speed lines by 2012, shortening journey times considerably for the expected seven billion annual passengers."
• Thomas Friedman Demands Communist Revolution [Gawker] "Flat-earther Times columnist Thomas Friedman thinks we should probably "outsource" our form of government to China, where they have streamlined the whole process by eliminating the bit where idiots "vote." No, seriously, he is outright saying that the autocratic one-party Chinese government is superior to our own. There is no equivocation in this line: "There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today." And why are things better in China? Because the current "reasonably enlightened group of people" in charge of China, at the moment, can just impose "politically difficult but critically important policies" like raising gas prices to encourage clean power investment and so on."
• China tip-off 'sparked' fighting [Al Jazeera] "A senior Myanmar official has said that last month's clashes in the northeast of the country were sparked after a Beijing tipped them off about the location of an illegal arms factory. Up to 30,000 people fled across the border from Kokang into northern China during the fighting which followed the raid on the arms factory in the mainly ethnic Chinese region."